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Friday, July 8, 2016

Let's Hear the Beginning

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 15 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My secret subject is: You have been hired to write a movie based on either Iron Man or Thor. Which one do you choose? What is your move about?

First, I have to go on record as saying that I’m not really a super comic book nerd. As in, I don’t read comics much at all, and I don’t watch every comic book movie that comes out. In fact, I rarely enjoy the ones I do see. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have any interest at all in them. Tim Burton’s Batman is still pretty high on my list of movies I love, and I have a solid fascination with some of the DC villains—especially Joker and Harley Quinn. I absolutely can’t wait to see Suicide Squad and compare Jared Leto’s conceptualization of Joker with Heath Ledger’s and Jack Nicholson’s. Those actors played very different Jokers in ways that really leave the two incomparable (which is often a huge point of contention with actual DC fans…).

My Marvel fandom consists only of Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy. That’s it. And honestly, my fandom has everything to do with the quality of the films that got me into those characters and absolutely nothing to do with the comic books themselves.

For reference, I’ll give a rundown of the kinds of movies I actually like or at least name some of my favorites along with my favorite directors…

The Big Lebowski

Office Space

Dazed and Confused

Weird Science

No Country for Old Men

Pan’s Labyrinth

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas/Where the Buffalo Roam

Beetlejuice

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure

Rocky Horry Picture Show

And for directors, the Coen Brothers, early Tim Burton, John Hughes ( I mean, duh…), Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick (even though he kinda butchers books...), and David Fincher.

If you know those movies and directors then you can see there’s not a lot of action-oriented films with fights and destruction and robot battles or mutants (though I do still love TMNT sans Michael Bay bastardizing them). I mean, the height of action in any of those films is in No Country for Old Men involving a monster of a man hunting down and killing folks, but the thing is, that’s not even the premise of the film or the book it’s based on. It’s about a man, the sheriff, coming trying to be a good ol’ boy in a world that is slowly killing those kinds of guys off because the struggle to join modernity is too much. It’s that struggle that captivated me especially in the novel. Everything in the story, the entire plot and every detail, catered to the sheriff’s internal struggle furthering him down the road to giving up his life’s passion.

So yeah…comic book movies just usually aren’t my thing.

For the sake of this discussion, though, I have to make a choice that takes me a bit beyond my comfort zone and into territory that I’m not the least bit familiar with. I mean, I saw the first Iron Man film because Robert Downey Jr. is snarky and lovely, and I know Thor has been in some comic based movies, but that’s kinda the extent of my knowledge of either.

With a little Google education, I’m prepared to say I would choose a Thor move, hands down. For one, there have been more Iron Man movies, so the market is a little saturated already. Also, Norse mythology is fairly interesting. Freyja, a goddess, presides over sex, love, death, sorcery and war and who rides into battle wearing a feathered cloak of badassness. Her brother Freyr, the god of virility and agriculture, falls in love and marries a badass female giant. Norse mythology is rich with complex characters and stories that could provide the basis for a great movie about the history of Asgard as well as the other 8 world inhabited by living creatures and all the characters within them. This movie plot could wind together parts of classic mythological stories and could take place prior to Thor’s birth or leading up to it or even when he is a young child.

The larger than life characters of comic books, the headliners, are all interesting, but they sort of hog all the glory. I mean, I’m a huge Harry Potter fan, but I am always down to read some fan fiction about George and Fred because those characters meant so much to me during the novels, and I cannot tell you how much I would love, LOVE, to read some backstory on Sirius. His death affected me in ways that a book character’s demise never has, and I often cry when a beloved character meets his or her end.

So, my suggestion, is a deeper look at the secondary characters in Thor’s world. Let’s make him a little less prominent and explore all of Norse mythology.

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Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

I'm so grateful I didn't get this prompt. I'd have failed it. LOL I love your handling of it. I'd totally watch your movie, and I love your approach to it. I'd have chosen Iron Man. My reasoning would be... To work with Robert Downey Jr. I'd then have chosen to let him lead the way or something. I'm beyond clueless. Great post!!

I'm not a fan of comic books either so I only knew who Thor was until you mentioned Robert Downey Jr.. Norse mythology is something that I don't know much about, but it sounds like a good movie. Plus now I have to read up on it!

About Me

I write, knit (sort of), love music, dance when no one is looking, snort when I laugh, talk about sex, consider myself a feminist, snore, sigh heavily when I see a bearded man, and make some badass desserts.